Tuesday, March 29, 2011

The new breed of web browsers include a feature called Geolocation that enables websites to tap into the new geolocation API in HTML5 to detect your geographic location by looking up your IP address. This is often used by websites to deliver location specific services. Google use geolocation in their search engine, and so does Bing. Facebook, Twitter and a crop of location based services such as Foursquare makes extensive use of geo-location.

Some people don’t like the idea of broadcasting their location to random websites on the Internet. To mask their location people use proxy servers or VPN. You can also easily turn off geolocation feature in your browser.

On Firefox, type about:config in the address bar, and then locate the setting geo.enabled. Double click this item and set it to “false.”

In Google Chrome, the location setting can be found under Options > Under The Hood > Content Settings > Location. Here set the option “Do not allow any site to track my physical location”.